Copyright is a form of protection provided by Federal law to authors of original works, which, under Section 102 of the Copyright Act, include literary, musical, and dramatic works; pantomimes; choreographic works; pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works; motion picture and other audiovisual works; sound recordings; and architectural works.
This listing is illustrative, not exhaustive, as the Act extends copyright protection to ‘‘original works of authorship in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed.’’ Section 102(a). Moreover, in 1980, the Copyright Act was amended to extend copyright protection to computer programs.
Furthermore, the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984 extended protection for ten years to safeguard mask works embodied in a semiconductor chip product. On March 1, 1989, the United States joined the Berne Convention, an international treaty protecting copyrighted works.
In 1998 Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which amended the Copyright Act to implement the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty of 1996 by extending U.S. copyright protection to works required to be protected under these two treaties.
The WIPO treaty called for adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by copyright owners to prevent unauthorized exercise of their copyrights. The DMCA contains three principal anticircumvention provisions.
The first provision prohibits the act of circumventing a technological protection measure put in place by a copyright owner to control access to a copyrighted work. Under the DMCA, ‘‘to circumvent a technological measure’’ means ‘‘to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner.’’
The second provision prohibits creating or making available technologies developed or advertised to defeat technological protections against unauthorized access to a copyrighted work. The third provision prohibits creating or making available technologies developed or advertised to defeat technological protections against unauthorized copying or other infringements of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner in a copyrighted work.
Thus, the first two prohibitions deal with access controls while the third prohibition deals with copy controls. They make it illegal, for example, to create or distribute a computer program that can break the access or copy protection security code on an electronic book or a DVD movie.
In no case does the copyright protection accorded an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
Section 102(b). Copyright protection encompasses only an original expression of an idea. For example, the idea of interfamily feuding cannot be copyrighted, but a particular expression of that idea in the form of a novel, drama, movie, or opera may be copyrighted.
How To Apply For Copyright?
Copyright applications are filed with the Register of Copyrights in Washington, D.C. Although copyright registration is not required, because copyright protection begins automatically as soon as the work is fixed in a tangible medium, registration is advisable, nonetheless, because it is a condition of certain remedies (statutory damages and attorneys’ fees) for copyright infringement.
When a work is published, it is advisable, though no longer required, to place a copyright notice on all publicly distributed copies so as to notify users about the copyright claim. If proper notice appears on the published copies to which a defendant in a copyright infringement case had access, then the defendant will be unable to mitigate actual or statutory damages by asserting a defense of innocent infringement.
Section 401. Innocent infringement occurs when the infringer did not realize that the work was protected. Notice consists of (1) the symbol ª or the word ‘‘Copyright’’ or the abbreviation ‘‘Copr.’’; (2) the year of first publication; and (3) the name of the owner of the copyright.
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